Pau Ponders is a free newsletter. If you would like to support my work, I invite you to become a paid subscriber. This is a reader-supported offering and I am so grateful for your presence here. Please feel free to share parts of this newsletter that resonate with you on social media or send to someone you love. Thank you for being here.
It is morning and I am mourning.
I look in the mirror and hold my heart with both hands and I recite to myself the sweetest premonitions. I wipe my own tears as I taste the salt of a new and profound sadness. I catch a glimpse of the pure innocence of my inner child, hurting. I lend myself to care for her fully.
I wrap my new purple scarf around my neck and I step out into the day. Enya is in my headphones. For a while, I didn’t know what to listen to while I walked with this grief, but now, the answer feels very clear, and it’s her. Did you know that she lives in a castle all by herself?
A strange kind of grace holds me now. Familiar and unknown. I stare into the abyss full of anything, I squirm a bit. A new depth of feeling comes to greet me. I have no choice but to go to the trees. To look up at their long trunks and ponder how and when they got so tall. I take my grief on a stroll to see what lives there.
I am no stranger to doom. I swell with and swallow my own suffering for breakfast when it comes to visit. I think about death just as often as I think about life. Rarely does one sound particularly more exciting than the other. I say this without an ounce of morbidness. Rather, I understand how the premise of life incites its opposite end, like all things. Besides, death is the continuation of life after life.
Sometimes this makes me think I must be misguided. Maybe the manifestation girlies have brainwashed me to believe that Great Sadness is a recipe for unending suck, that — Feeling It is a prescription for a cold, dry and lifeless excuse for a life. That I have to keep the ‘vibrations high’ if I want to call in what’s meant for me. I have to laugh every time I entertain the idea that it might be better to censor or suppress my pain in an effort to get what I want.
Life is about so much more than getting what you want. Besides,
I like to think it gives me pronounced context and depth. My edges have been carved. I know how to lean in. I know how to sulk. I know how to pity the fool. Some may call it wrong, or bad. It’s the only way I’ve ever known. To take two spoonfuls of medicine for every spoonful of sugar. Maybe it’s because Saturn is the ruler of my chart, maybe it's because I did unspeakable things in my life before this one. Maybe it’s because I’m stubborn.
Perhaps, it's because I do not turn away from contrast because I see it as an opportunity to experiment with familiar, unfamiliar and unique shades of new extremes. I know that for each end of every spectrum begs the question: How willing am I to venture to both sides? How willing am I to exist with both? How willing am I to understand that experiencing one does not negate the existence of the other? Can I understand that I am not the things that I feel, but rather I am the one who experiences them?
It could also be because I want a good life, so I fight for it. But as long as I’m fighting, I live in a war of my own creation. And now more than ever, I have no choice but to ask, what am I fighting for? What are we fighting for?
I put down my sword and armor. I slip off my clothes. I sit on the floor, butt naked. I welcome the mouth of endings to gnaw at me and swallow me whole. Cheeks on the cold tile with nothing to hold. I compare it to being taken by a big wave on an ominous beach day. Eerie is the wind that surrounds us. The sun is high in the sky, and while others fight for their life, I let myself go.
I’m a daughter to the Sea, anyway. There’s nothing to fear.
I allow myself to be tousled and aroused by the spurts of adrenaline coursing through my veins, understanding very well that there is nothing left to do but to let the water take me, however it may.
I am speaking to you from the dark cave. The big ache. This is where I embrace the void. I’m not afraid to be here. I welcome grit from the hollows of my heart. I do not shy away from the sting. The tunnel of sorrow is a place I know to seek refuge.
Sorrow does not ask you to be anything other than what you are. Any space that holds you as you are and asks for nothing more is where you belong. This is where truth can recognize more truth.
I sit in here, with a flashlight, held by my own undying bite. I taste the bitter residue of a timeline I no longer belong to and swirl down the drain of Now What?
Days later, the collective comes to join me here after Election day in the United States. Suddenly my own stage of rage and sadness is not only my own. It is ours.
In a world where the codes for joy and freedom can be accessed and unlocked within us, the archetype of the oppressor will play out its known opposite effect all in an effort to rattle us and our honest process towards the total and unhinged embodiment of the love we know already belongs to us. The ‘man’ comes to stifle us in our fight towards something truly necessary, good and true. Reflects back to us where we have yet to acknowledge our own shadow as it is cast out onto the collective consciousness. To feel anger is to understand where we can uphold better boundaries. To feel sadness is to be shown how we can better validate what big emotions come to be felt by us. To feel heartbroken shows us our capacity to love, and to be loved in return.
The people who hurt us, the things that happened that hurt us— they are not our enemy, they are our train ticket home.
To know these freedom codes, to have been shown glimpses of the love that is true and real and possible, is also to know its predecessor, its final chapter and its mirror image.
When we are blindsided— by life, by an outcome, by an unforeseen force, by loss, by sudden sweeping change, by the unimaginable— we must accept the terms of what it means to live inside of a contradiction. To live in the reality where what we thought we knew to be true is not in fact the truth.
Until it is time to be or know something else.
But first must come total death and utter dissolution.
For as deeply as I believe in forging the way forward and creating a reality one lives deeply in reverence to, so too do I believe in creating a proper burial for what is no longer alive or true inside of you.
To let what must die, die.
It is imperative to mourn what was lost in the depth of your own capacity to believe in and love it. It wants to be held by you in the darkness of your own cold night. This is also where the first sign of light will find you.
It is here, in the bare, in the impossible, in the chasm of the End that you have been invited to release what you thought you knew for sure. To be suspended in a masticated spasm of this kind of pain is to commune with one of the realest elements of all — your own depth of feeling. The contraction, before the expansion. This kind of ache does not discriminate, and it often goes after those of us who have been courageous enough to open ourselves up completely to the possibility of devastation in the name of a Real thing. A Real thing like love, like hope, like belief, like autonomy, like authentic choice, like pure goodness.
When we are courageous in honor of a Real thing, we become a field.
The most honest thing you can do in the face of loss, is thank it for the space it once occupied with tenderness.
What you must understand about grief, is that it will hurt to the extent that you loved.
What you must understand about grief, is that it is evidence of your capacity to feel.
What you must understand about grief, is that to endure, you must feel it.
What you must understand about grief, is that it is here to transform you.
Be open to it, or not. It will come to sit with you either way. Whether you are at the grocery store, or the park, or eating lunch with a friend— something sudden will sleuth within you. It will ask you to look at it with love. It will create wet marks on your face and pungent contractions in your chest, usually right about where you used to feel beautiful and light things. Your body is the vehicle through which you experienced such inspiration. It is the same body that will experience its sudden and temporary absence. Its emptiness. Its daunting and barren bones. Your body is a field.
There’s nothing left to do but embrace the void. Here is where we create space to be grateful for even the things we didn’t ask for.
Here is where we learn to say and mean: I didn’t get my way, but I led with my heart, and if with the same heart I am asked to accept this and let go, I must trust it with the same conviction that I did once before.
A few days ago, I went to one of the very first coffee shops I discovered when I first got to Madrid. I sat there with a tiny coffee and a slice of almond cake. This was my best attempt at Continuing this day. As I stared into the void, a handful of streams found their way out of my tear ducts and down my cheekbones, quickly and without warning.
A stranger who worked there looked at me. They saw me and I saw them see me see them see me and they handed me a glass of water. Even more tears now. I dabbed my cheeks with a napkin. I let grief overcome me, like an animal in my own body. Moments later, she asked me if I would like some chamomile tea. To which I replied, yes. She brought me tea and asked me what was wrong and I told her that I was heartbroken. She stayed with me for a while, and spoke goodness to me. Told me that a smile like mine was made to stay. That I had the most beautiful eyes she had ever seen in her life.
I asked her about what she had learned from her time living in Madrid. She told me that she learned how to be alone. And it felt like grace. Like a wink from a star. Like a message in a bottle that read none of us are exempt from circumstances that leave us feeling solitary. And still, we find one another in this feeling.
It goes like this,
Rupture. Rage. Scream. Cry. Wake. Rest. Cry. Cry. Cry. Scream. Rage. Repeat this until it's all out.
Then, be still. Then, take the ache out of your ribcage and hold it up to the sun.
See yourself with the loving eyes of a stranger who has no reason to be kind to you, but does so anyway. See yourself with the light of a thousand suns. See yourself as the one who knows how to take good care of you. See yourself as resilient. See yourself as strong. See yourself as the one who will get through this, somehow. See yourself as the one who chooses you. See yourself as the one who votes for you. See yourself as the one who acts with you in mind.
And then let yourself fall apart into a trillion and one tiny pieces, go touch grass and let yourself dissolve into the soil, become nobody.
Be the vast open space where change first begins to see itself as a possibility. Be the field.
Because baby, this is just the beginning.
The revolution needs your anger integrated.
The revolution needs your sadness integrated.
The revolution needs your grief integrated.
The revolution needs your shame integrated.
The revolution needs your disgust integrated.
The revolution needs your pain integrated.
The revolution needs your anguish integrated.
The revolution needs your suffering integrated.
The revolution needs your hope integrated.
The revolution needs your belief integrated.
The revolution needs your faith integrated.
The revolution needs your love integrated.
The revolution needs your acceptance integrated.
The revolution needs your conviction integrated.
The revolution needs your strength integrated.
The revolution needs your Word integrated.
The revolution needs your unique vision integrated.
The revolution needs you.
Once you allow yourself to be devoured by the Big Ache, you are ready to become something untouched, new.
If these words find you on your own deathbed, may it be a salve for your own tired heart. Your delicate wings need time to rest. Go look for something beautiful amid the unrest. See what charm may find you on a windowsill. In how some things never change. Like how even when you’ve been burned, your inner well is innocent in its ongoing search for warmth.
Stand tall in your magic, bend with it when it asks you to take a new shape. Trust the voice that tells you to act from your center and do not cower when it is time to confront the consequences of your own choices. Choice is immanent of contrast. You were born from both ends. Chaos is the precedent to creation.
Do not fear the dissolution of self. Lose yourself completely. If questions weigh heavy on your chest, throw them out the window, and trust the ones that count to find you again in perfect time. Release your need for conclusions tied with a pretty bow. Move from the place within you that knows, even when you do not. Your embodied intention to be deliberate in your faith and aligned action is enough. Entertain the thought of something bright. Go there often. May your authentic truth be a persistent friend who continues to look for you, everywhere you go. However you feel.
If you are courageous enough to venture into the belly of love, hold onto nothing but your lantern, prepare to be spit out. Love owes you nothing and will grant you everything.
I love you from the deepest depths of my being,
Pau
Consider sharing this post to bring Pau’s words across worlds among your own.
This hit me in so many ways at all the right times
Sorrow does not ask you to be anything other than what you are 🙌🙌